geologist had ever sold.) Lyell became something of a celebrity—the
Steven Pinker of his generation—and when he spoke in Boston more than
four thousand people tried to get tickets.
For the sake of clarity (and a good read), Lyell had caricatured his
opponents, making them sound a great deal more “unphilosophical” than
they actually were. They returned the favor. A British geologist named
Henry De la Beche, who had a knack for drawing, poked fun at Lyell’s ideas
about eternal return. He produced a cartoon showing Lyell in the form of
a nearsighted ichthyosaur, pointing to a human skull and lecturing to a
group of giant reptiles.
“You will at once perceive,” Professor Ichthyosaurus tells his pupils in
the caption, “that the skull before us belonged to some of the lower order
of animals; the teeth are very insignificant, the power of the jaws trifling,
and altogether it seems wonderful how the creature could have procured
food.” De la Beche called the sketch “Awful Changes.”
AMONG the readers who snapped up the Principles was Charles Darwin.
Twenty-two years old and fresh out of Cambridge, Darwin had been
invited to serve as a sort of gentleman’s companion to the captain of the
HMS Beagle, Robert FitzRoy. The ship was headed to South America to
survey the coast and resolve various mapping discrepancies that
hindered navigation. (The Admiralty was particularly interested in finding
the best approach to the Falkland Islands, which the British had recently
assumed control of.) The voyage, which would last until Darwin was
twenty-seven, would take him from Plymouth to Montevideo, through
the Strait of Magellan, up to the Galápagos Islands, across the South
Pacific to Tahiti, on to New Zealand, Australia, and Tasmania, across the
Indian Ocean to Mauritius, around the Cape of Good Hope, and back again
to South America. In the popular imagination, the journey is usually seen
as the time when Darwin, encountering a wild assortment of giant
tortoises, seafaring lizards, and finches with beaks of every imaginable
shape and size, discovered natural selection. In fact, Darwin developed his